I find it hard to believe that this law trumps the law surrounding trade secrets in Sweden.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Finder of Lost Next-Generation iPhone Identified
- Thread starter sravana
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
That's not how it works. If something is stolen it's probably also reported stolen, not lost, and the thief isn't to walk into the police station and give himself away. They just don't, trust me, we've had this for 70 years and the system works. There is no finder's fee for items that can't be utilized by the finder without committing a crime (credit cards, keys etc) and there are exceptions for certain items like bikes which are easy to "find" (=steal) since they're usually kept outdoors and out of view for the owner.
Pretty much, yes. I very much enjoyed growing up in a small Scandinavian town in the 70's when nobody locked their front doors, cars or bicycles because it wasn't on their map that anyone might steal it (and no one did), but those days are long gone and society is what it is, you can either hang yourself or readjust to the new times.
Hmmm... well that's sad, very sad indeed.
The "finders fee" that you describe might actually work, but it shouldn't always take a reward for someone to do the right thing.
Our laws in that area deal mostly with advanced industrial espionage and other heavy duty stuff. I think Apple would have to round up all the lawyers in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland in order to convince a Swedish court that a few grainy pictures of a product that's eight weeks from launch is worth the court's time. Eight weeks is less than the time between the iPad unveiling and its release date. Most cellphone manufacturers show off their products months and months before they go on sale. Sometimes they're just 3D renderings or dummies. Heck, pictures of a disassembled iPhone 4 prototype were published on a Chinese website months ago. No "trade secret" panic there either. The fact that Apple insists on sticking with the Keynote unveiling ceremony schtick isn't about trade secrets, it's just their own silliness.
Had Gizmodo published detailed blueprints of this phone a year ago, it would've been another story.
This is why Sweden is such an innovation and technology powerhouse. 8 weeks is 1/6th (17%) the iPhone product lifespan. That's 8 weeks of lost iPhone 3GS sales as people now postpone purchases to get the new device instead (and for those who will say 'who cares as long as Apple gets the sale?' the mathematics of this have been discussed in various threads in great detail. It matters.)
Finder of Lost Next-Generation iPhone Identified
The fact is, you don't get to determine what is important to the owner of IP about how it gets disseminated.
If there was anything that was patentable in the hardware of the proto, the clock would have started when Gizmodo released detailed information and pics, not just rumors about what it does.
Two months does matter.
The fact is, you don't get to determine what is important to the owner of IP about how it gets disseminated.
If there was anything that was patentable in the hardware of the proto, the clock would have started when Gizmodo released detailed information and pics, not just rumors about what it does.
Two months does matter.
Good point. They have 12 months from the disclosure to at least file a provisional.
How many people who have now seen the prototype would have been holding off anyway because they know a new iPhone is around the corner? The prototype could even convince them that waiting isn't worth it and they take the plunge anyway. I don't think that this will affect sales a great deal because the proportion of people who read tech sites is small.
This has been on every local newscast, the Daily Show, CNN, the NY Times, David Letterman's Top 10 list, etc. It's not just the "tech sites." And Apple isn't stupid - if pre-announcing things wasn't deleterious to sales, they'd do it. It's a standard thing they teach you in business school - it's usually called the "Osborne Effect" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)
Seems to have been reported a whole lot more in America than here in UK. But Gizmodo can only be blamed for the initial blog post. Any reports after that seem to have been caused by the police attention it has received. Unless the Daly Show were reporting on the iPhone prototype even before that?
Most of the reports have been about gizmodo's actions and legal troubles. If Gizmodo hadn't done what they'd done, there would be almost nothing to report. So, yeah, Gizmodo is to blame.
No. If the police hadn't been involved the iPhone prototype would be seen only amongst sites like this one. Any damage to sales would be minimal.
I find your argument bizarre. The only reason the cops are involved is that Gizmodo received stolen property and misappropriated trade secrets. The initial misappropriation resulted in a ton of press, and the police action resulted in still more press. But if you commit a crime, you can't blame the cops for collateral damage that occurs while they are doing their job investigating what you did. Just like if I stab you, I'm to blame if the ambulance carrying you gets involved in a traffic accident and kills you. I put you in that position, so it's my fault.
The police responded to a request from Apple. Would there have been so much interest from the police without that request?
I read that article about the Osborne Effect. It seems to come from products that were announced years ahead, not months. And everybody knew there would be a new iPhone coming, they just didn't know what the features would be. In the examples in that article, the companies didn't seem to have predictable release schedules.
Wow.
That's what the police typically do. They investigate crimes that are reported to them.
Probably not, but it's not reasonable to ask Apple not to report the crime - they didn't know what would happen to the device, and were probably hopeful the cops could get the device before Gizmodo disassembled it and showed the innards to the world. They may have feared that the device would be sold to competitors, etc. They were trying to mitigate their damage (which, by law, they are required to do).
First, "years ahead, not months." Those examples were years, but technology moves much faster now.
Second: "everybody knew there would be a new iPhone coming." You want it both ways. I'd argue ONLY people who follow tech sites knew that a new iphone was coming.
It was my belief that they reported to the police after they received the device. By everybody, I mean everybody who read the tech sites.
My understanding is that Apple made their complaint before receiving the device, but I am not sure of the timeline (nor, I think, is anyone else).
Ok, so Apple didn't likely lose many 3GS sales to people who closely follow Apple. But most potential sales are to people who do not read tech sites (but most of whom do watch at least one of: local news, network news, Letterman, Daily Show, CNN, NY Times, etc.)
The sanjose article linked on this site says Wednesday or Thursday of last week, with the article dated 27th of April.
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/04/26/daily36.html
There is an article about Apple asking for their phone back dated Tuesday, 20th of April.
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/04/19/daily20.html
So perhaps they didn't have it back, but they knew where it was. The article also says that the police haven't charged anybody yet, it's just an investigation, so it may turn out not to be criminal.
I think you're full of surströmming.
C'mon now...quite sure you're not having us on just a wee bit? Exaggerating just a tad for effect, to make a point?
I'm not suggesting that Scandinavians necessarily have all the litigiousness, vindictiveness, and aggression that make this country great, but surely they would at least hand out a mild scolding to someone who in violation of contract or statute got hold of trade secrets and broadcast them just to kick up their website's page view count? Or is it that Scandinavian jurisprudence honors the equitable maxim that "ut quod anuba meditatus dum non est serius"?
Look, Apple has released a new iPhone once every summer for 4 years and the last one was a blantant interim product that begs for a successor; any organism with more than two cells can figure out the "trade secret" that a new iPhone is coming very soon. So if they're still stupid enough to buy the year-old interim model at this point, they are so far out of the tech news loop they probably think Gizmodo has something to do with a Gremlins sequel and have no clue about iPhonegate.
The only "trade secret" here is the phone's internals which we've been given a decent albeit basic look at, a few weeks before the mandatory iFixit teardown. There are no groundbreaking mystery components inside (Nokia engineers: "OMG it has a battery! Again!!") and no Chinese knock-offs can be knocked together in 8 weeks.
I think we did OK with dynamite, the zipper with interlocking teeth, the adjustable spanner, the blowtorch, cardiography, the 3-point safety belt, the self-aligning ball bearing, the implantable pacemaker and various other useless contraptions, but there's only so much you can milk out of a population of 9 million farmers. Ikea isn't doing half bad and Ericsson is #1 in telecommunications equipment with a market share of 35%. And nothing sucks like an Electrolux.
I can't say we've done too well in the computer age, true. It's an old-school engineering and manufacturing nation. We have ridiculously modern telecom infrastructure with enough bandwidth to nuke Alderaan but nobody's using it for anything productive, only for torrenting the **** out of the rest of the world. Other than the Swede who founded Skype, and a bunch of computer games like the Battlefield series, I can only think of music software company Propellerhead which makes one of the top 5 most popular software synth applications, Reason. And, well, Linux was created by a Fede, Swinn, whatever you call the Swedish minority in Finland. Mexiswede? Finnadian?
Thank you Anuba for that list. I was thinking cmaier's comment was a little innaccurate. Not to mention the fact that Sweden is a country 1/30th the size of the US.
Not to mention that the only real news here is the design of the case. We really learned almost nothing else about this phone from Gizmodo's "reporting".
"We think the screen looks like it maybe has a higher resolution! There's a front-facing camera! It's reasonable to speculate that it has more RAM!"
It's not like these are earth-shattering features that Motorola, HTC, and Samsung would have never thought of, but now they can get a head start on catching up to the new iPhone. In fact, most of these are features that other phone manufacturers have already released or announced. The only really interesting tidbit would have been learning what kind of processor it has, but of course even Gizmodo was smart enough to not destroy the phone to find out.
"We think the screen looks like it maybe has a higher resolution! There's a front-facing camera! It's reasonable to speculate that it has more RAM!"
It's not like these are earth-shattering features that Motorola, HTC, and Samsung would have never thought of, but now they can get a head start on catching up to the new iPhone. In fact, most of these are features that other phone manufacturers have already released or announced. The only really interesting tidbit would have been learning what kind of processor it has, but of course even Gizmodo was smart enough to not destroy the phone to find out.
No, I honestly, sincerely believe this, and I'm not exaggerating. I don't think I could sufficiently explain to an American how non-litigous our culture is. How to put it... um... if the words "I'm going to sue you" are ever uttered, it's intended as a joke and used figuratively, not based on any sort of Swedish reality but on the notion of lawsuits featured in American TV shows and movies. Like you're pretending you're in an episode of Law & Order for 5 seconds, or that you're Tom Cruise on South Park, and then you've had your laugh and go back to your desk.
If a company or organization is ever involved in some sort of legal entanglements on such a scale that it warrants media attention, it's because once every year or so, some CEO or chairman or such has goofed up and embezzled, or... I dunno, insider trading, something like that. But those are criminal cases. If the words company/organization and lawsuit are used together, 10 times out of 10 it's because a Swedish company is involved in some lawsuit in the US.
You could say those words to a Swedish court but I think you'd have to go over the "page view count" part a couple of times. Maybe if it's the judge from the Pirate Bay trial he'll nod and go mhm, yeah website I know what those are all about. But on the whole I think they'd just be scratching their heads, and eventually ask you if you've seen too many Hollywood movies or something.
Relative to the item illegally sold, this is a massive investigation.
The police admitted they had looked into the legality of the search of Jason Chen's apartment beforehand, which means they've spent far more time and money investigating this relatively small crime compared to the typical stolen mobile phone.
If you're still having trouble with the definition, I can lend you my dictionary.